Broadened Ford business services portfolio in Hungary - VIDEO REPORT

The US-based Ford, a global leader in the automotive industry, has chosen Hungary as the location for its European Business Service unit. The knowledge centre in Budapest is to give home to a number of the financial, production planning, product management, controlling, after sales and HR functions of Ford in Europe, and will serve as a hub for the delivery of several global tasks for 41 markets worldwide.

The Ford Motor Company, which is celebrating the 115th anniversary of its operation, has 9 regional R&D centres and 61 plants around the world. In 2017 it recorded a revenue of USD 156.78 billion, giving work to over 200 thousand employees. As one of the top car manufacturers, last year Ford invested USD 8 billion in research and development.

The company, which has been present in Hungary for 18 years, first started to expand its Hungarian team by moving the European financial unit to the country in 2012. As a next step, 2015 welcomed the establishment of the Business Service Centre in Szentendre. Together with the staff in its EMEA service centre in Budapest, Ford will be providing work to more than 500 highly qualified colleagues in Hungary. This employee number will rise up to 700 by the end of 2019.

Besides the BSCs, the company also supports a continuously expanding supplier network in Hungary, currently consisting of 40 companies and 69,000 employees, manufacturing and supplying parts for Ford production facilities, with a total revenue of 580 billion HUF (2,27 billion USD) in 2017 that is 1.7% of Hungarian GDP.

Having outgrown its original purpose, the business service sector has undergone remarkable transformation. Now the firms have added new activities to their centralization package, such as HR, treasury, higher level IT support, project management and mathematical modelling. And along with this came the positive impact of the sector's job-creating power, which enhanced the hiring of young graduates, who are not only skilled and qualified for the job, but speak several languages and add high value.

There are as many as 110 business service centres in Hungary, giving work to around 46 thousand people, who are mostly from generation Y. They are young graduates, and can boast with a command of foreign languages. The sector defines foreign language knowledge as a pre-requisite: the Hungarian BSCs provide their services in 5 languages on average, but there again centres where the number of languages may even exceed 30.